Three Days in May: When Winston Churchill wobbled

A new play uses painstaking historical research to imagine a truly decisive
moment in British history.

Warren Clarke plays the great man in Three Days in MayPhoto: KEITH PATTISON

By Jasper Rees

6:01PM BST 25 Oct 2011

A few years ago, he was voted the greatest Briton in a national television poll. Other notable victories include the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Second World War. But for all his manifold centrality to the British identity, is it not the case that more or less everything that can be said about Winston — young Winston, old Winston, grouchy Winton, oratorical Winston, cigars-and-Cognac Winston — has now been said. Not only said but dramatised.

Setting aside the mountainous stack of biographies which consider the great man from every conceivable angle, he also makes regular appearances on screen. Robert Hardy, Simon Ward and Julian Fellowes have all played him. Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm and the Irishman Brendan Gleeson in Into the Storm gave their Winston. He was most recently spotted in the guise of Timothy Spall, advising on the matter of the abdication in The King’s Speech. Therefore enough Winston already?

Not quite. After a tour of regional theatres, a new play taxies into the West End which aims to show Churchill in quite a new light, if not to historians then to theatre-goers. Three Days in May refers to a period in the late spring of 1940, when Churchill had been PM of the newly formed coalition for a matter of days. The French army had parted like the waters of the Red Sea and the Wehrmacht was swarming north in the general direction of the 250,000-strong British Expeditionary Force, which was hastening towards Dunkirk. The question asked by playwright Ben Brown is this: in those three crucial days, did Churchill wobble?

“I had always assumed,” explains Brown, “that once Churchill became prime minister there was never any question of suing for peace. That is the myth.” The myth — an integral preamble to the modern British creation myth forged in the skies above Kent and Sussex in September 1940 — is that Churchill never gave a second thought to appeasement. That was Chamberlain’s bag — peace in our time and all that — and the baton of making a deal with Hitler was taken up by the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax.

“To quote Churchill’s exact words about these three days,” continues Brown: “'Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether or not we should fight on alone never found a place on the War Cabinet agenda. We were much too busy to waste time on such unreal, academic issues.’ Which is straightforward b-------. It was a complete cover-up.”

This terrain is already covered in Roy Jenkins’s biography, for example, and John Lukacs’s Five Days in London. That will not stop some Churchillians from giving a wide berth to the talk of appeasement in Three Days in May. It begins on Sunday May 26, with the five-strong War Cabinet in Westminster Abbey joining the nation in a national day of prayer. “It was that desperate,” says Brown.

The play also features Jock Colville, the 25-year-old cabinet secretary, as a sort of Greek chorus, and Clement Attlee, although “Labour were frankly about as powerful as the Lib Dems in today’s coalition”. So the kernel of the drama, which begins with the French PM Reynaud flying in to London and begging the British government to join them in suing for peace, is essentially a three-day, three-way argument. In one corner there’s Halifax, in another Churchill and in between there’s Chamberlain, who was still leader of the Conservative Party and still resident in No 10, where almost all of the play takes place.

Brown is not a historian — he read law at university — but has made a habit of writing history plays which require immense research. For his play The Balfour Declaration he decided he “had to know the whole history of Zionism”. For Three Days in May he read all the biographies, all the published letters and, in the case of Halifax and Chamberlain, the unpublished ones, too. “I probably spent a year researching it.”

Did he sense the dramatis personae writing with posterity looking over their shoulder?

“Chamberlain’s handwriting is illegible,” Brown says. “He was so depressed that his honesty makes him very direct — 'the blackest day of all… the most horrible in our history’. With Halifax I do get more of a feeling of self-justifying. It’s as if he can hear the hounds baying for his reputation.”

As for Churchill, his history of the war, of course, suppressed all evidence of a wobble. The evidence for Brown’s claim is not exactly set in stone. He has used the minutes of Cabinet meetings, but key conversations in the Admiralty and the garden of No 10 were unminuted. “And there are 15 minutes when there was no secretary present on the 26th. That is possibly the bit where Churchill had his wobble. On the 27th, it’s referred back to in the Cabinet papers – this idea that Churchill himself allowed Lord Halifax to draw up a draft proposal to go with the French and seek negotiation via Mussolini.”

Out of this national emergency, Brown has fashioned a drama that portrays a moment as decisive as any in modern British history. “We were the only opposition to Hitler. Once you’ve made that decision to continue with the war, it was the last time, in a way, that Britain was the decisive factor in world history. It seemed to me obvious that the play’s ending was when the final decision is made on May 28 and the beginning was when they set the question: do we fight or don’t we? Effectively, do we fight the Battle of Britain, or not? This was almost appeasement’s last stand.”